Dates of baptisms, marriages, deaths,
and burials; wills, conveyances, legal processes,
William Shakespeare, Shakespeare also
spelled Shakspere, byname Bard of
Avon or Swan of Avon, (baptized April 26, 1564,
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England—
died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-
Avon), English poet, dramatist, and actor, often
called the English national poet and considered
by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time.
Shakespeare occupies a position unique in
world literature. Other poets, such
as Homer and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo
Tolstoy and Charles Dickens,
have transcended national barriers; but no
writer’s living reputation can compare to that of
Shakespeare, whose plays, written in the late
16th and early 17th centuries for a small repertory
theatre, are now performed and read more often
and in more countries than ever before. The
prophecy of his great contemporary, the poet and
dramatist Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare “was
not of an age, but for all time,” has been fulfilled.
It may be audacious even to attempt a definition
of his greatness, but it is not so difficult to and payments by the court—these are the dusty
details. There are, however, many
describe the gifts that enabled him to create
contemporary allusions to him as a writer, and
imaginative visions of pathos and mirth that,
these add a reasonable amount of flesh and
whether read or witnessed in the theatre, fill the
blood to the biographical skeleton.
mind and linger there. He is a writer of
great intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness, and
poetic power. Other writers have had these
qualities, but with Shakespeare the keenness of
mind was applied not to abstruse or remote
subjects but to human beings and their complete
range of emotions and conflicts. Other writers
have applied their keenness of mind in this way,
but Shakespeare is astonishingly clever with
words and images, so that his mental energy,
when applied to intelligible human situations,
finds full and memorable expression, convincing
and imaginatively stimulating. As if this were not
enough, the art form into which his creative
energies went was not remote and bookish but
involved the vivid stage impersonation of human Britannica Classics: William ShakespeareThis
beings, commanding sympathy and film recounts the life of Shakespeare from his
inviting vicariousparticipation. Thus, early boyhood through his productive years as a
Shakespeare’s merits can survive translation into playwright and actor in London. It is a 1955
other languages and into cultures remote from production of Encyclopædia Britannica
that of Elizabethan England. Educational Corporation.Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc.
Early life in Stratford
The parish register of Holy Trinity Church
in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, shows
that he was baptized there on April 26, 1564; his
birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. His
father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess of
the borough, who in 1565 was chosen
an alderman and in 1568 bailiff (the position
corresponding to mayor, before the grant of a
Shakespeare The Man further charter to Stratford in 1664). He was
Life engaged in various kinds of trade and appears to
Although the amount of factual knowledge have suffered some fluctuations in prosperity. His
available about Shakespeare is surprisingly large wife, Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, Warwickshire,
for one of his station in life, many find it a little came from an ancient family and was
disappointing, for it is mostly gleaned from the heiress to some land.
documents of an official character.

Birthplace of William Shakespeare, Stratford-
upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England.© Albert
Rose/Archive Photos
Stratford enjoyed a grammar school of good
quality, and the education there was free, the
schoolmaster’s salary being paid by the borough.
No lists of the pupils who were at the school in the
16th century have survived, but it would be
absurd to suppose the bailiff of the town did not
send his son there. The boy’s education would
consist mostly of Latinstudies—learning to read,
write, and speak the language fairly well and
studying some of the Classical historians,
moralists, and poets. Shakespeare did not go on
to the university, and indeed it is unlikely that the
scholarly round of logic, rhetoric, and other
studies then followed there would have interested
him.
Instead, at age 18 he married. Where and exactly
when are not known, but the episcopal registry
at Worcester preserves a bond dated November
28, 1582, and executed by two yeomen of
Stratford, named Sandells and Richardson, as a
security to the bishop for the issue of a license for
the marriage of William Shakespeare and “Anne
Hathaway of Stratford,” upon the consent of her
friends and upon once asking of the banns. (Anne
died in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare.
There is good evidence to associate her with a
family of Hathaways who inhabited a beautiful
farmhouse, now much visited, 2 miles [3.2 km]
from Stratford.) The next date of interest is found
in the records of the Stratford church, where a
daughter, named Susanna, born to William
Shakespeare, was baptized on May 26, 1583. On
February 2, 1585, twins were baptized, Hamnet MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
and Judith. (Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son,
died 11 years later.)
How Shakespeare spent the next eight years or
HIGH SCHOOL DANIEL
so, until his name begins to appear
in London theatre records, is not known. There OCTAVIO CRESPO
are stories—given currency long after his death—
of stealing deer and getting into trouble with a
local magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote,
near Stratford; of earning his living as a SIGNATURE:
schoolmaster in the country; of going to London
and gaining entry to the world of theatre by ENGLISH
minding the horses of theatregoers. It has also
been conjectured that Shakespeare spent some
time as a member of a great household and that
he was a soldier, perhaps in the Low Countries.
In lieu of external evidence, such extrapolations
about Shakespeare’s life have often been made
TEACHER:
from the internal “evidence” of his writings. But
this method is unsatisfactory: one cannot
JOHANA
conclude, for example, from his allusions to the
law that Shakespeare was a lawyer, for he was
clearly a writer who without difficulty could get
whatever knowledge he needed for
the compositionof his plays.
ELABORATED
ROSHANY FORBES
YEAR: XII-B
2019
  Shakespeare's parents, wife, and There is an upstart crow, beautified with our
William Shakespeare feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a
children were all likely illiterate.
Players hide supposes he is as well able to
QUICK FACTS
 Shakespeare first popularized the names bombast out a blank verse as the best of you;
View Media Page and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in
Olivia, Cordelia, Jessica, and Miranda
his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a
BAPTIZED (with those spellings). country.
Career in the theatre What these words mean is difficult to determine,
April 26, 1564
The first reference to Shakespeare in the literary but clearly they are insulting, and clearly
Stratford-upon-Avon, England world of London comes in 1592, when a fellow Shakespeare is the object of the sarcasms. When
dramatist, Robert Greene, declared in a pamphlet the book in which they appear (Greenes, groats-
DIED written on his deathbed: worth of witte, bought with a million of
April 23, 1616 Repentance, 1592) was published after Greene’s
death, a mutual acquaintance wrote a preface
Stratford-upon-Avon, England offering an apology to Shakespeare and testifying
to his worth. This preface also indicates that
(Died on this day) Shakespeare was by then making important
NOTABLE WORKS friends. For, although the puritanical city of
London was generally hostile to the theatre, many
 “Hamlet”
of the nobility were good patrons of
 “The Taming of the Shrew” the drama and friends of the actors. Shakespeare
 “Henry IV, Part 1” seems to have attracted the attention of the
 “The Merry Wives of Windsor” young Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd earl of
 “King John” Southampton, and to this nobleman were
 “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” dedicated his first published poems, Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
 “The Merchant of Venice”
One striking piece of evidence that Shakespeare
 “Henry IV, Part 2” began to prosper early and tried to retrieve the
 “Henry VI, Part 1” family’s fortunes and establish its gentility is the
 “The Tempest” fact that a coat of arms was granted to John
Shakespeare in 1596. Rough drafts of this grant
MOVEMENT / STYLE have been preserved in the College of Arms,
 Jacobean age London, though the final document, which must
have been handed to the Shakespeares, has not
NOTABLE FAMILY MEMBERS BRITANNICA QUIZ survived. Almost certainly William himself took
 Spouse Anne Hathaway the initiative and paid the fees. The coat of arms
DID YOU KNOW? appears on Shakespeare’s monument
(constructed before 1623) in the Stratfordchurch.
 Starlings were brought to North America Equally interesting as evidence of Shakespeare’s
Shakespearean Plays: Fact or worldly success was his purchase in 1597 of New
in 1890 when Shakespeare fanatic
Place, a large house in Stratford, which he as a
Eugene Schieffelin decided Central Park Fiction?
boy must have passed every day in walking to
should contain all the songbirds school.
Shakespeare’s first play
mentioned in Shakespeare's works.
was Twelfth Night.

coat of armsA look at an illustrated manuscript
by Ralph Brooke, a herald in the English College
of Arms in the 1590s. During that period the
college granted coats of arms to a prominent
fishmonger and to William Shakespeare, but
Brooke considered both applicants
unworthy.Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare
Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing
Partner)
How his career in the theatre began is unclear,
but from roughly 1594 onward he was an
important member of the Lord Chamberlain’s
company of players (called the King’s Men after
the accession of James Iin 1603). They had the
best actor, Richard Burbage; they had the best
theatre, the Globe (finished by the autumn of
1599); they had the best dramatist, Shakespeare.
It is no wonder that the company prospered.
Shakespeare became a full-time professional
man of his own theatre, sharing in a cooperative
enterprise and intimately concerned with the
financial success of the plays he wrote.
Globe Theatre, copperplate engraving.Mary
Evans Picture Library
Unfortunately, written records give little indication
of the way in which Shakespeare’s professional
life molded his marvelous artistry. All that can be
deduced is that for 20 years Shakespeare
devoted himself assiduously to his art, writing
more than a million words of poetic drama of the
highest quality.
Private life
Shakespeare had little contact with officialdom,
apart from walking—dressed in the royal livery as
a member of the King’s Men—at the coronation
of King James I in 1604. He continued to look
after his financial interests. He bought properties
in London and in Stratford. In 1605 he purchased
a share (about one-fifth) of the Stratford tithes—a
fact that explains why he was eventually buried in
the chancel of its parish church. For some time he
lodged with a French Huguenot family called
Mountjoy, who lived near St. Olave’s Church in
Cripplegate, London. The records of a lawsuit in
May 1612, resulting from a Mountjoy family
quarrel, show Shakespeare as giving evidence in
a genial way (though unable to remember certain
important facts that would have decided the case)
and as interesting himself generally in the family’s
affairs.
William Shakespeare's house, Stratford-upon-
Avon, Warwickshire, England.© Bettmann/Corbis
No letters written by Shakespeare have survived,
but a private letter to him happened to get caught
up with some official transactions of the town of
Stratford and so has been preserved in the
borough archives. It was written by one Richard
Quiney and addressed by him from the Bell Inn in
Carter Lane, London, whither he had gone from
Stratford on business. On one side of the paper
is inscribed: “To my loving good friend and
countryman, Mr. Wm. Shakespeare, deliver
these.” Apparently Quiney thought his fellow
Stratfordian a person to whom he could apply for
the loan of £30—a large sum in Elizabethan
times. Nothing further is known about the
transaction, but, because so few opportunities of
seeing into Shakespeare’s private life present
themselves, this begging letter becomes a
touching document. It is of some interest,
moreover, that 18 years later Quiney’s son
 Thomas became the husband of Judith, Like so many circumstances of Shakespeare’s
Shakespeare’s second daughter. personal life, the question of his sexual nature is
shrouded in uncertainty. At age 18, in 1582, he
Shakespeare’s will (made on March 25, 1616) is married Anne Hathaway, a woman who was eight
a long and detailed document. It entailed his quite years older than he. Their first child, Susanna,
ample property on the male heirs of his elder was born on May 26, 1583, about six months after
daughter, Susanna. (Both his daughters were the marriage ceremony. A license had been
then married, one to the aforementioned Thomas issued for the marriage on November 27, 1582,
Quiney and the other to John Hall, a respected with only one reading (instead of the usual three)
physician of Stratford.) As an afterthought, of the banns, or announcement of the intent to
he bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his wife; marry in order to give any party the opportunity to
no one can be certain what raise any potential legal objections. This
this notoriouslegacy means. The testator’s procedure and the swift arrival of the couple’s first
signatures to the will are apparently in a shaky child suggest that the pregnancy was unplanned,
hand. Perhaps Shakespeare was already ill. He as it was certainly premarital. The marriage thus
died on April 23, 1616. No name was inscribed on appears to have been a “shotgun” wedding. Anne
his gravestone in the chancel of the parish church gave birth some 21 months after the arrival of
of Stratford-upon-Avon. Instead these lines, Susanna to twins, named Hamnet and Judith,
possibly his own, appeared: who were christened on February 2, 1585.
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear Thereafter William and Anne had no more
To dig the dust enclosed here. children. They remained married until his death in
Blest be the man that spares these stones, 1616.
And curst be he that moves my bones. Were they compatible, or did William prefer to live
apart from Anne for most of this time? When he
moved to London at some point between 1585
John Russell BrownTerence John Bew and 1592, he did not take his family with
SpencerThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica him. Divorce was nearly impossible in this era.
RELATED BIOGRAPHIES Were there medical or other reasons for the
 John Fletcher absence of any more children? Was he present
 Voltaire in Stratford when Hamnet, his only son, died in
1596 at age 11? He bought a fine house for his
 Robert Browning
family in Stratford and acquired real estate in the
 John Dryden
vicinity. He was eventually buried in Holy Trinity
 Francis Beaumont Church in Stratford, where Anne joined him in
 John Marston 1623. He seems to have retired to Stratford from
 Thomas Middleton London about 1612. He had lived apart from his
 Sir John Suckling wife and children, except presumably for
 James Shirley occasional visits in the course of a very busy
 Thomas Nabbes professional life, for at least two decades.
BROWSE CATEGORIES His bequeathing in his last will and testament of
 dramatic literature his “second best bed” to Anne, with no further
 poetry mention of her name in that document, has
 April 23 suggested to many scholars that the marriage
was a disappointment necessitated by an
Sexuality unplanned pregnancy.
What was Shakespeare’s love life like during
those decades in London, apart from his family?
Knowledge on this subject is uncertain at best.
According to an entry dated March 13, 1602, in
the commonplace book of a law student named
John Manningham, Shakespeare had a brief
affair after he happened to overhear a female
citizen at a performance of Richard III making an
assignation with Richard Burbage, the leading
actor of the acting company to which
Shakespeare also belonged. Taking advantage
of having overheard their conversation,
Shakespeare allegedly hastened to the place
where the assignation had been arranged, was
“entertained” by the woman, and was “at his
game” when Burbage showed up. When a
message was brought that “Richard the Third”
had arrived, Shakespeare is supposed to have
“caused return to be made that William the
Conqueror was before Richard the Third.
Shakespeare’s name William.” This diary entry of
Manningham’s must be regarded with
much skepticism, since it is verified by no other
evidence and since it may simply speak to the
timeless truth that actors are regarded as free
spirits and bohemians. Indeed, the story was so
amusing that it was retold, embellished, and
printed in Thomas Likes’s A General View of the
Stage (1759) well before Manningham’s diary
was discovered. It does at least suggest, at any
rate, that Manningham imagined it to be true that
Shakespeare was heterosexual and not averse to
an occasional infidelity to his marriage vows. The
film Shakespeare in Love (1998) plays amusedly
with this idea in its purely fictional presentation of
Shakespeare’s torchy affair with a young woman
named Viola De Lesseps, who was eager to
become a player in a professional acting
company and who inspired Shakespeare in his
writing of Romeo and Juliet—indeed, giving him
some of his best lines.
Apart from these intriguing circumstances, little
evidence survives other than the poems and
plays that Shakespeare wrote. Can anything be
learned from them? The sonnets, written perhaps
over an extended period from the early 1590s into
the 1600s, chronicle a deeply loving relationship
between the speaker of the sonnets and a well-
born young man. At times the poet-speaker is
greatly sustained and comforted by a love that
seems reciprocal. More often, the relationship is
one that is troubled by painful absences, by
jealousies, by the poet’s perception that other
writers are winning the young man’s affection,
and finally by the deep unhappiness of an outright
desertion in which the young man takes away
from the poet-speaker the dark-haired beauty
whose sexual favours the poet-speaker has
enjoyed (though not without some revulsion at his
own unbridled lust, as in Sonnet 129). This
narrative would seem to posit heterosexual desire
in the poet-speaker, even if of a troubled and
guilty sort; but do the earlier sonnets suggest also
a desire for the young man? The relationship is
portrayed as indeed deeply emotional and
dependent; the poet-speaker cannot live without
his friend and that friend’s returning the love that
the poet-speaker so ardently feels. Yet readers
today cannot easily tell whether that love is aimed
at physical completion. Indeed, Sonnet 20 seems
to deny that possibility by insisting that Nature’s
having equipped the friend with “one thing to my
purpose nothing”—that is, a penis—means that
physical sex must be regarded as solely in the
province of the friend’s relationship with women:
“But since she [Nature] pricked thee out for
women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love and thy
love’s use their treasure.” The bawdy pun on
“pricked” underscores the sexual meaning of
the sonnet’s concluding couplet. Critic Joseph
Pequigney has argued at length that the sonnets
nonetheless
do commemorate a consummatedphysical
relationship between the poet-speaker and the
friend, but most commentators have backed
away from such a bold assertion.
A significant difficulty is that one cannot be sure
that the sonnets are autobiographical.
Shakespeare is such a masterful dramatist that
one can easily imagine him creating such an
intriguing story line as the basis for his sonnet
sequence. Then, too, are the sonnets printed in
the order that Shakespeare would have
intended? He seems not to have been involved in
their publication in 1609, long after most of them
had been written. Even so, one can perhaps ask
why such a story would have appealed to
Shakespeare. Is there a level at which fantasy
and dreamwork may be involved?
The plays and other poems lend themselves
uncertainly to such speculation. Loving
relationships between two men are sometimes
portrayed as extraordinarily deep. Antonio
in Twelfth Night protests to Sebastian that he
needs to accompany Sebastian on his
adventures even at great personal risk: “If you will
not murder me for my love, let me be your
servant” (Act II, scene 1, lines 33–34). That is to
say, I will die if you leave me behind.
Another Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice,
risks his life for his loving friend Bassanio. Actors
in today’s theatre regularly portray these
relationships as homosexual, and indeed actors
are often incredulous toward anyone who doubts
that to be the case. In Troilus and Cressida,
Patroclus is rumoured to be Achilles’ “masculine
whore” (V, 1, line 17), as is suggested in Homer,
and certainly the two are very close in friendship,
though Patroclus does admonish Achilles to
engage in battle by saying,
A woman impudent and mannish grown
Is not more loathed than an effeminate man
In time of action
(III, 3, 218–220)
Again, on the modern stage this relationship is
often portrayed as obviously, even flagrantly,
sexual; but whether Shakespeare saw it as such,
or the play valorizes homosexuality
or bisexuality, is another matter.
Certainly his plays contain many warmly positive
depictions of heterosexuality, in the loves of
Romeo and Juliet, Orlando and Rosalind,
and Henry V and Katharine of France, among
many others. At the same time, Shakespeare
is astute in his representations of
sexual ambiguity. Viola—in disguise as a young
man, Cesario, in Twelfth Night—wins the love of
Duke Orsino in such a delicate way that what
appears to be the love between two men morphs
into the heterosexual mating of Orsino and Viola.
The ambiguity is reinforced by the audience’s
knowledge that in Shakespeare’s theatre
Viola/Cesario was portrayed by a boy actor of
perhaps 16. All the cross-dressing situations in
the comedies, involving Portia in The Merchant of
Venice, Rosalind/Ganymede in As You Like It,
Imogen in Cymbeline, and many others, playfully
explore the uncertain boundaries between the
genders. Rosalind’s male disguise name in As
You Like It, Ganymede, is that of
the cupbearer to Zeus with whom the god was
enamoured; the ancient legends assume that
Ganymede was Zeus’s catamite. Shakespeare is
characteristically delicate on that score, but he
does seem to delight in the frisson of sexual
suggestion.
David Bevington
Early posthumous documentation
Shakespeare’s family or friends, however, were
not content with a simple gravestone, and, within
a few years, a monument was erected on
the chancel wall. It seems to have existed by
1623. Its epitaph, written in Latin and inscribed
immediately below the bust, attributes to
Shakespeare the worldly wisdom of Nestor, the
genius of Socrates, and the poetic art of Virgil.
This apparently was how his contemporaries
in Stratford-upon-Avon wished their fellow citizen
to be remembered.
The tributes of his colleagues
The memory of Shakespeare survived long in
theatrical circles, for his plays remained a major
part of the repertory of the King’s Men until the
closing of the theatres in 1642. The greatest of
Shakespeare’s great contemporaries in the
theatre, Ben Jonson, had a good deal to say
about him. To William Drummond of
Hawthornden in 1619 he said that Shakespeare
“wanted art.” But, when Jonson came to write his
splendid poem prefixed to the Folio edition of
Shakespeare’s plays in 1623, he rose to the
occasion with stirring words of praise:
First FolioFrontispiece of the First Folio, the first
published edition (1623) of the collected works of
William Shakespeare; it was originally titled Mr.
William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories &
Tragedies.The Newberry Library, Louis H. Silver
Collection, 1965 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
Besides almost retracting his earlier gibe about
Shakespeare’s lack of art, he gives testimony that
Shakespeare’s personality was to be felt, by
those who knew him, in his poetry—that the style
was the man. Jonson also reminded his readers
of the strong impression the plays had made
upon Queen Elizabeth I and King James I at court
performances:
Sweet Swan of Avon, what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of
Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!
Shakespeare seems to have been on affectionate
terms with his theatre colleagues. His fellow
actors John Heminge and Henry Condell (who,
with Burbage, were remembered in his will)
dedicated the First Folio of 1623 to the earl of
Pembroke and the earl of Montgomery,
explaining that they had collected the plays
“without ambition either of self-profit or fame; only
to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and
fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.”
Anecdotes and documents
Seventeenth-century antiquaries began to
collect anecdotes about Shakespeare, but no
serious life was written until 1709, when Nicholas
Rowe tried to assemble information from all
available sources with the aim of producing a
connected narrative. There were local traditions
at Stratford: witticisms and lampoons of local
characters; scandalous stories of drunkenness
and sexual escapades. About 1661 the vicar of
Stratford wrote in his diary: “Shakespeare,
Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting,
and it seems drank too hard; for Shakespeare
died of a fever there contracted.” On the other
hand, the antiquary John Aubrey wrote in some
notes about Shakespeare: “He was not a
company keeper; lived in Shoreditch; wouldn’t be
debauched, and, if invited to, writ he was in pain.”
Richard Davies, archdeacon of Lichfield,
reported, “He died a papist.” How much trust can
be put in such a story is uncertain. In the early
18th century a story appeared that Queen
Elizabeth had obliged Shakespeare “to write
a play of Sir John Falstaff in love” and that he had
performed the task (The Merry Wives of Windsor)
in a fortnight. There are other stories, all of
uncertain authenticity and some mere
fabrications.
When serious scholarship began in the 18th
century, it was too late to gain anything from
traditions. But documents began to be
discovered. Shakespeare’s will was found in
1747 and his marriage license in 1836. The
documents relating to the Mountjoy lawsuit
already mentioned were found and printed in
1910. It is conceivable that further documents of
a legal nature may yet be discovered, but as time
passes the hope becomes more remote. Modern
scholarship is more concerned to study
Shakespeare in relation to his
social environment, both in Stratford and in
London. This is not easy, because the author and
actor lived a somewhat detached life: a respected
tithe-owning country gentleman in Stratford,
perhaps, but a rather rootless artist in London.
John Russell BrownTerence John Bew
SpencerThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Shakespeare The Poet And Dramatist
The intellectual background
Shakespeare lived at a time when ideas and
social structures established in the Middle
Ages still informed human thought and
behaviour. Queen Elizabeth I was God’s deputy
on earth, and lords and commoners had their due
places in society under her, with responsibilities
up through her to God and down to those of more
humble rank. The order of things, however, did
not go unquestioned. Atheism was still
considered a challenge to the beliefs and way of
life of a majority of Elizabethans, but the Christian
faith was no longer single. Rome’s authority had
been challenged by Martin Luther, John Calvin, a
multitude of small religious sects, and, indeed, the
English church itself. Royal prerogative was
challenged in Parliament; the economic and
social orders were disturbed by the rise of
capitalism, by the redistribution of monastic lands
under Henry VIII, by the expansion of education,
and by the influx of new wealth from discovery of
new lands.
An interplay of new and old ideas was typical of
the time: official homilies exhorted the people to
obedience; the Italian political theorist Niccolò
Machiavelli was expounding a new, practical
code of politics that caused Englishmen to fear
the Italian “Machiavillain” and yet prompted them
to ask what men do, rather than what they should
do. In Hamlet, disquisitions—on man, belief, a
“rotten” state, and times “out of joint”—clearly
reflect a growing disquiet and skepticism. The
translation of Montaigne’s Essays in 1603 gave
further currency, range, and finesse to such
thought, and Shakespeare was one of many who
read them, making direct and significant
quotations in The Tempest. In philosophical
inquiry the question “How?” became the impulse
for advance, rather than the traditional “Why?”
of Aristotle. Shakespeare’s plays written between
1603 and 1606 unmistakably reflect a
new, Jacobean distrust. James I, who, like
Elizabeth, claimed divine authority, was far less
able than she to maintain the authority of the
throne. The so-called Gunpowder Plot (1605)
showed a determined challenge by a small
minority in the state; James’s struggles with
the House of Commons in successive
Parliaments, in addition to indicating the strength
of the “new men,” also revealed the inadequacies
of the administration.
Poetic conventions and dramatic traditions
The Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence were
familiar in Elizabethan schools and universities,
and English translations or adaptations of them
were occasionally performed by
students. Seneca’s rhetorical and sensational
tragedies, too, had been translated and often
imitated. But there was also a strong native
dramatic tradition deriving from
the medieval miracle plays, which had continued
to be performed in various towns until forbidden
during Elizabeth’s reign. This native drama had
been able to assimilate French popular farce,
clerically inspired morality plays on abstract
themes, and interludes or short entertainments
that made use of the “turns” of individual clowns
and actors. Although Shakespeare’s immediate
predecessors were known as University wits,
their plays were seldom structured in the manner
of those they had studied at Oxford or Cambridge;
instead, they used and developed the more
popular narrative forms.
Changes in language
The English language at this time was changing
and extending its range. The poet Edmund
Spenser led with the restoration of old words, and
schoolmasters, poets, sophisticated courtiers,
and travelers all brought further contributions
from France, Italy, and the Roman classics, as
well as from farther afield. Helped by the growing
availability of cheaper, printed books, the
language began to become standardized in
grammar and vocabulary and, more slowly, in
spelling. Ambitious for a European and
permanent reputation, the essayist and
philosopher Francis Bacon wrote in Latin as well
as in English; but, if he had lived only a few
decades later, even he might have had total
confidence in his own tongue.
Shakespeare, William: languageA look at
William Shakespeare's contributions to the
vocabulary of the English language.© Open
University (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Shakespeare’s literary debts
Shakespeare’s most obvious debt was
to Raphael Holinshed, whose Chronicles (the
second edition, published in 1587) furnished story
material for several plays,
including Macbeth and King Lear. In
Shakespeare’s earlier works other debts stand
out clearly: to Plautus for the structure of The
Comedy of Errors; to the poet Ovid and to
Seneca for rhetoric and incident in Titus
Andronicus; to morality drama for a scene in
which a father mourns his dead son and a son his
father, in Henry VI, Part 3; to Christopher
Marlowe for sentiments and characterization
in Richard III and The Merchant of Venice; to the
Italian popular tradition of commedia dell’arte for
characterization and dramatic style in The
Taming of the Shrew; and so on. Soon, however,
there was no line between their effects and his.
In The Tempest (perhaps the most original of all
his plays in form, theme, language, and setting)
folk influences may also be traced, together with
a newer and more obvious debt to a courtly
diversion known as the masque, as developed
by Ben Jonson and others at the court of King
James.
Of Shakespeare’s late works, Cardenio (now
lost) was probably based on incidents involving
the character Cardenio in Miguel de
Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Since that great work
had been translated into English in 1612
by Thomas Shelton, it was available to
Shakespeare and John Fletcherwhen they
evidently collaborated as authors on Cardenio in
1613. Fletcher turned to Cervantes in several of
his later plays.
Theatrical conditions
The Globe and its predecessor, the Theatre, soon be over. The Duke of York in Richard II is
were public playhouses run by the Chamberlain’s conscious of how
Men, a leading theatre company of which …in a theatre, the eyes of men,
Shakespeare was a member. Almost all classes After a well-graced actor leaves the stage
of citizens, excepting many Puritans and like- Are idly bent on him that enters next,
minded Reformers, came to them for afternoon Thinking his prattle to be tedious.
entertainment. The players were also summoned
to court, to perform before the monarch and
assembled nobility. In times of plague, usually in (For more about Shakespeare and dramatic
the summer, they might tour the provinces, and performance in his day, seeSidebar:
on occasion they performed at London’s Inns of Shakespeare on Theatre.)
Court (associations of law students), at In Shakespeare’s day there was little time for
universities, and in great houses. Popularity led group rehearsals, and actors were given the
to an insatiable demand for plays: early in 1613 words of only their own parts. The crucial scenes
the King’s Men—as the Chamberlain’s Men were in Shakespeare’s plays, therefore, are between
then known—could present “fourteen several two or three characters only or else are played
plays.” The theatre soon became fashionable, with one character dominating a crowded stage.
too, and in 1608–09 the King’s Men started to Most female parts were written for young male
perform on a regular basis at the Blackfriars, a actors or boys, so Shakespeare did not often
“private” indoor theatre where high admission write big roles for them or keep them actively
charges assured the company a more select and engaged onstage for lengthy periods. Writing for
sophisticated audience for their performances. the clowns of the company—who were important
(For more on theatre in Shakespeare’s popular attractions in any play—presented the
day, see Sidebar: Shakespeare and the problem of allowing them to use their comic
Liberties.) personalities and tricks and yet have them serve
the immediate interests of theme and action. (For
a discussion of music in Shakespeare’s
plays, see Sidebar: Music in Shakespeare’s
Plays.)
The dating of Shakespeare’s plays
London theatres (c. 1600).Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc.
For a chronological listing of Shakespeare’s
Shakespeare’s first associations with the
plays, see below. Despite much scholarly
Chamberlain’s Men seem to have been as an
argument, it is often impossible to date a
actor. He is not known to have acted after 1603,
given playprecisely. But there is a
and tradition gives him only secondary roles, such
general consensus, especially for plays written in
as the ghost in Hamletand Adam in As You Like
1588–1601, in 1605–07, and from 1609 onward.
It, but his continuous association must have given
The dates of compositionused here are based on
him direct working knowledge of all aspects of
external and internal evidence, on general
theatre. Numerous passages in his plays show
stylistic and thematic considerations, and on the
conscious concern for theatre arts and audience
observation that an output of no more than two
reactions. Hamlet gives expert advice to visiting
plays a year seems to have been established in
actors in the art of playing. Prospero in The
those periods when dating is rather clearer than
Tempest speaks of the whole of life as a kind of
others.
“revels,” or theatrical show, that, like a dream, will
Shakespeare’s two narrative poems, Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, can be dated
with certainty to the years when the plague
stopped dramatic performances in London, in
1592–93 and 1593–94, respectively, just before
their publication. But the sonnets offer many and
various problems; they cannot have been written
all at one time, and most scholars set them within
the period 1593–1600. “The Phoenix and the
Turtle” can be dated 1600–01.
Publication
Acting companies in London during the
Renaissance were perennially in search of new
plays. They usually paid on a piecework basis, to
freelance writers. Shakespeare was an important
exception; as a member of Lord Chamberlain’s
Men and then the King’s Men, he wrote for his
company as a sharer in their capitalist enterprise.
The companies were not eager to sell their plays
to publishers, especially when the plays were still
popular and in the repertory. At certain times,
however, the companies might be impelled to do
so: when a company disbanded or when it was
put into enforced inactivity by visitations of the
plague or when the plays were no longer current.
(The companies owned the plays; the individual
authors had no intellectual property rights once
the plays had been sold to the actors.)
Such plays were usually published in quarto
form—that is, printed on both sides of large
sheets of paper with four printed pages on each
side. When the sheet was folded twice and
bound, it yielded eight printed pages to each
“gathering.” A few plays were printed in octavo,
with the sheet being folded thrice and yielding 16
smaller printed pages to each gathering.
Half of Shakespeare’s plays were printed in
quarto (at least one in octavo) during his lifetime.
Occasionally a play was issued in a seemingly
unauthorized volume—that is, not having been
regularly sold by the company to the publisher.
The acting company might then commission its
own authorized version. The quarto title page
of Romeo and Juliet(1599), known today as the
second quarto, declares that it is “Newly
corrected, augmented, and amended, as it hath
been sundry times publicly acted by the Right
Honorable the Lord Chamberlain His Servants.”
The second quarto of Hamlet (1604–05) similarly
advertises itself as “Newly imprinted and
enlarged to almost as much again as it was,
according to the true and perfect copy.” Indeed,
the first quarto of Hamlet (1603) is considerably
shorter than the second, and the first quarto
of Romeo and Juliet lacks some 800 lines found
in its successor. Both contain what appear to be
misprints or other errors that are then corrected in
the second quarto. The first quarto of Love’s
Labour’s Lost(1598) presents itself as “Newly
corrected and augmented,” implying perhaps that
it, too, corrects an earlier, unauthorized version of
the play, though none today is known to exist.
The status of these and other seemingly
unauthorized editions is much debated today.
The older view of A.W. Pollard, W.W. Greg,
Fredson Bowers, and other practitioners of the
so-called New Bibliography generally regards
these texts as suspect and perhaps pirated, either
by unscrupulous visitors to the theatre or by minor
actors who took part in performance and who
then were paid to reconstruct the plays from
memory. The unauthorized texts do contain
elements that sound like the work of
eyewitnesses or actors (and are valuable for that
reason). In some instances, the unauthorized text
is notably closer to the authorized text when
certain minor actors are onstage than at other
times, suggesting that these actors may have
been involved in a memorial reconstruction. The
plays Henry VI, Part 2 and Henry VI, Part
3 originally appeared in shorter versions that may
have been memorially reconstructed by actors.
A revisionary school of textual criticism that
gained favour in the latter part of the 20th century
argued that these texts might have been earlier
versions with their own theatrical rationale and
that they should be regarded as part of a
theatrical process by which the plays evolved
onstage. Certainly the situation varies from
quarto to quarto, and unquestionably the
unauthorized quartos are valuable to the
understanding of stage history.
Several years after Shakespeare died in 1616,
colleagues of his in the King’s Men, John
Heminge and Henry Condell, undertook the
assembling of a collected edition. It appeared in
1623 as Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies,
Histories, and Tragedies, Published According to
the True Original Copies. It did not contain the
poems and left out Pericles as perhaps of
uncertain authorship. Nor did it include The Two
Noble Kinsmen, Edward III, the portion of The
Book of Sir Thomas Morethat Shakespeare may
have contributed, or the Cardenio that
Shakespeare appears to have written with John
Fletcher and that may have provided the basis
for Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood in 1727.
It did nonetheless include 36 plays, half of them
appearing in print for the first time.
Heminge and Condell had the burdensome task
of choosing what materials to present to the
printer, for they had on hand a number of
authorial manuscripts, other documents that had
served as promptbooks for performance (these
were especially valuable since they bore the
license for performance), and some 18 plays that
had appeared in print. Fourteen of these had
been published in what the editors regarded as
more or less reliable texts (though only two were
used unaltered): Titus Andronicus; Romeo and
Juliet (the second quarto); Richard II; Richard
III; Love’s Labour’s Lost; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry
IV, Part 2; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The
Merchant of Venice; Much Ado About
Nothing; Hamlet; King Lear; Troilus and
Cressida; and Othello. Henry VI, Part
1 and Henry VI, Part 2 had been published in
quarto in shortened form and under different titles
(The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two
Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The
True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York) but were
not used in this form by Heminge and Condell for
the 1623 Folio.
Much was discovered by textual scholarship after
Heminge and Condell did their original work, and
the result was a considerable revision in what
came to be regarded as the best choice of original
text from which an editor ought to work. In plays
published both in folio and quarto (or octavo)
format, the task of choosing was immensely
complicated. King Lear especially became a
critical battleground in which editors argued for
the superiority of various features of the 1608
quarto or the folio text. The two differ substantially
and must indeed represent different stages of
composition and of staging, so that both are
germane to an understanding of the play’s textual
and theatrical history. The same is true of Hamlet,
with its unauthorized quarto of 1603, its corrected
quarto of 1604–05, and the folio text, all
significantly at variance with one another. Other
plays in which the textual relationship of quarto to
folio is highly problematic include Troilus and
Cressida; Othello; Henry IV, Part 2; Henry VI,
Part 1 and Henry VI, Part 2; The Merry Wives of
Windsor; Henry V; and A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. Most of the cases where there are both
quarto and folio originals are problematic in some
interesting way. Individual situations are too
complex to be described here, but information is
readily available in critical editions of
Shakespeare’s plays and poems, especially
in The Oxford Shakespeare, in a collected edition
and in individual critical editions; The New
Cambridge Shakespeare; and the third series
of The Arden Shakespeare.